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January 2009

January 27, 2009

Energy use in agriculture and food production receives a lot of attention, but non-energy related greenhouse gas emissions play a significant role in the carbon footprints of many food commodities. The non-energy emissions are typically nitrous oxide and methane generated by enteric fermentation in ruminants, manure management practices, nitrogen fertilizer applications in soils, crop residues, anaerobic decomposition in flooded rice fields, etc. Based on our recent LCA calculations, here are some typical numbers for a selection of food commodities from various parts of the world.

January 05, 2009

The Umatilla Basin in Eastern Oregon became Oregon's bread basket through irrigation based on pumping water from deep aquifers. A report in the Oregonian says that groundwater is being depleted much faster than can be replenished by the 12-13 inches of annual rain in the area, and water levels have dropped 500 feet in some of the basin's aquifers. One dramatic measure of how this natural capital is being depleted: Carbon-14 dating has shown that some of the water being pumped out has been underground (and thus not exposed to the atmosphere) for 27,250 years!

According to the Oregonian, a proposal in the works would reverse this by diverting some 32 billion gallons of water from the Columbia River during the winter months, filtering it by percolation through a shallow alluvial aquifer, and then injecting it into deep basalt aquifers through existing wells. In the summer, the water would be pumped back out for irrigation. This saves the heavy river flow in the winter for the critical summer months without needing expensive above-ground reservoirs, and also allows the river flow in the summer to be used for other purposes (electricity generation, salmon/steelhead migrations). The most encouraging part is that it largely relies on the existing infrastructure of irrigation pipes, pumps and wells. Sounds like an absolute win-win if there are no engineering problems with the plan.

Large-scale recharging of aquifers -- from both river water and rain water -- is of significant interest for a couple of reasons. In places like Oregon, one of the effects of climate change is going to be increased winter rain, reduced snow packs, and earlier melting of snow packs -- resulting in increased winter river flows and reduced summer flows. The mountain snow packs have historically been a water storage mechanism, storing winter precipitation and then converting it to summer water supply, but nature is starting to cut back on this free 'service'. Artificial storage in aquifers could help maintain a more balanced water supply throughout the year. Elsewhere, in developing countries where groundwater is being depleted rapidly for food production and industrial uses (see for example, this and this), reliable methods of recharging aquifers could contribute to economic and food security.

The incoming administration's explicit focus on job creation is exactly what is needed. While infrastructure projects could provide a short-term boost to employment and green technologies may be able to help in the longer term, it is going to take some serious analysis to figure out how everyone can work and earn a living sustainably -- not just in the US but everywhere in the world. I mean 'sustainably' in both economic and environmental terms. A crucial part of all this is to identify the types of technologies that can help achieve these dual sustainability goals, as well as technologies that work against sustainability. There is some consensus (although not based on any rigorous modeling/analysis just yet) that many green technologies are likely to pass the dual sustainability test, while almost anything based on fossil fuels will not. Beyond that, it is a complex issue of trying to match technologies with the education, skills and natural resources available in each part of the world in order to conserve financial and natural capital while encouraging an optimal level of human labor.

On that note, here is an article I wrote in 2004 for GreenBiz on the choice of technologies for developing countries:

Thirty years after the publication of E.F. Schumacher's celebrated book, Small is Beautiful, which proposed matching the cost and scale of technologies to the people and resources of developing nations, a basic question remains: How can technology reduce poverty without destroying the Earth?

During the height of the Internet boom a few years ago, there were many who believed -- or wanted to believe -- that information technology could bring unimagined benefits to the poor, especially to those in isolated rural areas. This, in fact, became conventional wisdom in developing countries like India where the Internet became the de facto tool for modernizing the country. But, in spite of the conveniences that information technology undoubtedly provides, India’s vast rural population appears unimpressed by the results to date.

The recent election in India became, in part, a referendum on the country’s development trajectory and the voters made it clear that a better strategy was needed [this was written in 2004]. The bottom line is that advanced technologies have not made much of a difference to the lives of the 350 million Indians who live on less than a dollar a day, or the large numbers that are malnourished, unemployed, underemployed, or struggling to survive as farmers.

And yet, most of us suspect that technology plays a significant role in the development process. The only practical way out of poverty for the large populations of India and other developing countries is through work, and any profitable work requires tools. But what kinds of technological tools do developing societies need?

In sorting out this question, Schumacher arrived at the idea of intermediate technology, which he described as much more productive than the indigenous technology that developing countries have used for centuries but much cheaper than the highly capital-intensive technology of modern industry. Central to his thesis was the notion that the average cost of creating a job should be well within the means of a nation.

Recent reports suggest that India failed to achieve its goal of creating 10 million new jobs a year largely because the capital required to create a job -- well above 6000 dollars on average -- was too high. India now has some 40 million who are looking for jobs, with another 35 million likely to join them within three years.

Schumacher’s solution to this problem was to choose the right mix of technologies that could produce the necessary jobs at an affordable cost. This is a much more nuanced position than government policies that primarily advocate advanced technologies in every situation.

Economic success in intricately linked to technology. But technologies that are imported from developed countries often turn out to be inappropriate for conditions in the developing world. They are typically too expensive for the average user, waste precious natural resources, or save labor through automation when more jobs are needed.

India’s automobile industry is a case in point. It is growing fast in collaboration with American and Japanese automakers, and producing nearly a million passenger vehicles a year. But transportation systems built around private automobiles are out of the reach of the vast majority of Indians. They are also inefficient ways of moving people, wasting valuable fuel, land area and raw materials in a country of limited natural and financial resources. The logical alternative -- modern, efficient public transport that most people can afford -- remains a dream as the poor crowd into India’s overloaded trains and buses.

Manufacturing technologies brought into developing countries by multinational corporations are often capital-intensive, laborsaving technologies. Imported goods also bring with them, indirectly, the technologies used to create them. The net result of these technologies is economic growth that creates a relatively small number of jobs for technologists and technicians, while the developing world’s large labor pool -- much of it poor, uneducated, and semiskilled -- remains an untapped resource.

The argument that workers should counter technological change by retraining and moving up the value chain hardly applies to countries like India where over 40% of the population is still illiterate and very few have the education and skills to survive major changes. While the better-educated workers can adapt to disruptive technological change, most of the others need technologies adapted to their specific conditions. For developing countries, this means affordable technologies that conserve natural resources while encouraging an optimal level of human labor.

Schumacher observed that the choice of technology is the biggest decision that a developing country must make. This remains valid today even as globalization propels us toward a homogenous world where countries may soon be unable make such choices. Deliberately choosing the right technologies, rather than just the biggest and most powerful technologies available, may hold the key to a livable future.

January 03, 2009

I wrote the following article over four years ago. I am posting it again because the question seems even more relevant today as political leaders try to chart out the future of the economy. (The original article was published by GreenBiz and the San Jose Mercury News.)

On my last visit to India, I walked into a restroom at the airport in Bangalore, the high-tech capital of India, and was greeted by an attendant whose job was to dispense liquid soap and paper towels. The work was, of course, superfluous, but he clearly needed the job and the tips he occasionally received. Perhaps his labor could have been put to a more productive use elsewhere.

But anyone who has seen the vast ocean of humanity in a large developing country like India has to wonder what kind of productivity can truly provide a decent life to everyone. India’s high-tech mecca is full of people with low-tech skills or no skills at all, who provide their labor in myriad ways to keep the city running while elite engineers write software and design computer chips. Labor is not a scarce commodity in many developing regions of the world.

In contrast, labor productivity is central to any discussion of the U.S. economy. High labor productivity has been cited as one of the reasons for the slow job growth in the current economic recovery [thiswas written in 2004]. Still, many economists believe that productivity growth, which allows goods and services to be produced at decreasing cost, is the ultimate source of wealth for everyone. In competitive markets, lower production costs mean lower consumer prices, which stimulate demand and lead to further increases in productivity and, ultimately, wages. But this conventional argument ignores the crucial role of natural resources in production and consumption.

Labor remains expensive relative to natural resources such as energy and raw materials in industrialized countries. In response, new technologies are designed to reduce and eliminate human labor, making the remaining workers more and more productive. In the past 100 years, the farm sector has gone from using 40% of the U.S. workforce to just 2%. The manufacturing sector continues to lose jobs to automation and the use of cheaper labor overseas. We now transact much of our routine business with the likes of banks, bookstores, and airlines without ever seeing a human face or hearing a live voice.

Is it possible that we are over-optimizing one factor of production -- labor -- at the expense of other resources that are truly scarce? One way to answer this is to look at the biologically productive land and water area required to support our resource consumption and waste output.

Redefining Progress, a nonprofit organization that develops tools and policies for sustainability, estimates that it takes 9.57 hectares to support an average American. This ecological footprint is about 80% higher than locally available regenerative and absorptive capacity. The deficit is made up through imports and disproportionate use of global resources such as the atmosphere. The per-capita footprint is 1.36 hectares in China (36% above capacity) and 0.76 hectares in India (9% above capacity). Humanity’s total ecological footprint is nearly 16% higher than earth’s capacity, indicating an unsustainable depletion of natural capital.

The United States has the largest per-capita ecological footprint among all nations and consumes more than 20% of the world’s resources. Developing countries aspire to a similar living standard but face the enormous task of lifting hundreds of millions out of deep poverty. Their plan for economic growth depends on using large amounts of additional natural resources. China, for example, has become an insatiable consumer of energy and raw materials, with its energy consumption expected to more than double by 2030.

At the time of such unprecedented resource use, nearly 750 million people around the world are either unemployed or classified as “working poor”, according to the International Labor Organization. More than 500 million additional workers will enter the world’s labor markets by 2015.

A number of resource economists and sustainability thinkers have advocated an environmental tax shift in developed nations, which would reduce the tax burden on labor and increase it on fossil fuels, virgin raw materials, waste generation, and pollution. The idea is to encourage more employment of labor and less of scarce natural resources. Tax shifting is finding much more traction in Europe than in the United States.

In developing nations where labor costs are low and raw materials are relatively expensive, resource-saving and employment-generating activities such as repair and remanufacturing are already widespread. But technologies and lifestyles borrowed from rich countries -- including private automobiles and disposable products -- could destroy any possibility of sustainable development in these countries. What they lack -- and perhaps need the most -- are policies and technologies designed to radically increase resource productivity and employment opportunities in tandem.

It is difficult to imagine a livable future where unemployment and underemployment are rampant and the use of natural resources remains unrestrained. Both developed and developing nations face the same ultimate challenge: moving from a narrow view of productivity to a balanced consideration of how best to employ both human and natural resources.